Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Capital press. (Salem, OR) 19??-current | View Entire Issue (April 7, 2017)
12 CapitalPress.com April 7, 2017 Co-op requires its member-farmers to follow organic practices CO-OP from Page 1 On this day, the co-op will make deliveries to nine loca- tions, including a downtown market, several restaurants, a school district and housing for the Jesuit priests at Gonzaga University. Humble beginnings Grower standards LINC Foods requires its member-farmers to follow or- ganic practices, although they don’t have to be certifi ed, Robinette said. Any farmer who meets those requirements can sell $500 of product through the co-op without joining — a sort of trial basis, she said. Farmers who join pay $100 Matthew Weaver/Capital Press LINC Foods delivery truck driver Kyle Merritt and co-founder Beth Robinette watch as Latah, Wash., farmer Bruce Hogan moves carrots March 14 in the co-op warehouse in Spokane. Area in detail Online 2 http://www.lincfoods.com/ Mont. Idaho 2 95 Sandpoint 200 Lake Pend Oreille 95 Wash. Idaho 41 Hayden 90 Spokane, Wash., 2 home of LINC Foods co-op Coeur d’ Alene Cheney 28 5 St. Maries 90 LINC Foods coverage area Ritzville 195 Wash. Idaho 23 95 6 3 N Pullman 26 Snake R Robinette said the co-op is “light-years” ahead of when she and co-founder Joel Wil- liamson began it in 2014. “When we fi rst started, we were basically meeting farm- ers behind a hotel, next to the dumpster, running deliveries in Joel’s (car) and renting out a tiny little cooler in the back of the hotel,” she said. Today, the co-op has two delivery trucks and employs fi ve people. “We’ve learned a lot,” Rob- inette said. “In some ways, it’s like going back to a very old, traditional way of doing things and in some ways it’s like completely reinventing the wheel and using technolo- gy to help connect people and tell the story of where their food comes from.” LINC is one of nearly 1,500 co-ops in the nation, according to the USDA Ru- ral Development Directory of Farmer Cooperatives. Of that total, 74 are in California, 14 are in Idaho, 21 are in Oregon and 46 are in Washington. Many, including LINC Foods, are organized to help small and medium-sized farms and ranches build a local customer base. LINC Foods has become a signifi cant outlet for Sprou- le. He sells 10 percent of his produce through the co-op, and may increase that to 15 percent this year, he said. On March 14, he delivered beets and microgreens — the fi rst leaf stage of a vegetable, typically used for garnish or specialty foods — for distri- bution. Sproule raises 6 acres of vegetables, primarily for farmers’ markets. “A lot of the restaurants and schools order fairly large quantities,” Sproule said. “We’re a fairly large farm, so it’s nice to be able to move hundreds of pounds of things instead of smaller amounts.” Sproule plans to continue with the co-op. “It’s growing steadily — that’s good for everybody,” Sproule said. Hogan is a newcomer, having only become involved a few weeks earlier. He’d con- tacted the co-op several years ago, looking for an outlet for his produce. LINC contacted him when it needed more car- rots, he said. “They’ve been willing to take the larger carrots, which are slow movers for me,” Hogan said. “What kills me is having to throw them out because they didn’t move. I hate to put in all that effort to throw them out.” iver per year. The money goes into an individual capital account and farmers receive it back, plus their share of profi ts ac- cumulated over their time in the co-op, Robinette said. Robinette recommends the book “Wholesale Success,” by Atina Diffl ey, the hand- book all the co-op’s farmers use as a guide for how their wholesale produce should look, be graded, sorted and packed. “At the beginning, we didn’t really know anything about that — even to our ex- perienced farmers, a lot of that stuff was kinda new,” Robinette said. “We got some weird stuff in some weird packaging. I’m very thankful to the customers that stood by us while we fi gured all of that out.” The co-op has several guilds — one for produce, referred to informally as the Veggie Guild; one for live- stock, the Critter Guild; a Grain Growers Guild and a Value-Added Guild. Val- ue-added products are al- lowed depending on how many locally sourced ingredi- ents they have and where the non-local ingredients come from, Robinette said. Moscow 20 miles 3 Alan Kenaga/ Capital Press The farms are all within a 250-mile radius of Spokane, but the vast majority are with- in a 30-minute drive of the city, Robinette said. Both rural and urban farms participate, she said, enthus- ing that every co-op member “has the coolest background” and “is so different and so special.” “We have everything, from a farmer who’s trying to start the fi rst tech farm — he’s built his own walk-in cooler that has this awesome space-age interface that auto- matically adjusts the humid- ity and temperature based on what products are in it,” she said. “We have every- thing from that to farmers who don’t use a cell phone or the internet. We have to call them on the phone to talk to them and hope that they’re at home.” Members’ politics are equally diverse. “We have from the furthest left-leaning whatever to com- plete Libertarian — and ev- erybody gets along,” she said. “Everybody can come togeth- er over this common mission of trying to feed our commu- nity and support each other.” Policy calls for ranchers and WDFW to agree on tactics WOLF from Page 1 If in place last summer, WDFW could have initiated lethal removal seven days after the first depredation. Also, WDFW would have considered shooting wolves last fall in the Smackout pack. WDFW documented one probable and two con- firmed depredations within eight days. Under the exist- ing policy, the pack was still two confirmed depredations away from being a candidate for lethal removal. In cases in which attacks are farther apart, four dep- redations will remain the threshold, though the win- dow will be shortened to 10 months from 12 months. One probable attack could be counted. Stevens County Commis- sioner Don Dashiell, a mem- ber of the advisory group, said the new policy improves the lethal-removal protocol. But he said it still doesn’t give WDFW the room to act as soon as attacks begin. “I’m not that enthused because my vision was one depredation, and we do something,” he said. The policy also calls for ranchers and WDFW to agree on tactics to prevent and re- spond to depredations before using lethal control as a last resort. Martorello said the department will not require ranchers to sign damage-pre- vention contracts. “It can be a dialogue,” he said. Conservation Northwest’s representative on the advisory group, Paula Swedeen, said the changes were sensible. “It’s at least a conversation between the (WDFW) confl ict specialist and the producer,” she said. WDFW also pledged to make more information avail- able about what it and ranch- ers are doing to keep wolves and livestock apart. Swedeen said the on-the-ground mea- sures should reassure wolf ad- vocates. “I think it keeps tem- peratures down when people have more of a description,” she said. Where food goes The co-op delivers to cus- tomers as far north as Sand- point, Idaho; as far south as Pullman, Wash.; as far west as Cheney, Wash., and as far east as Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Each year the co-op meets with its main customers to de- termine the projected demand for the coming year. The co- op then distributes the projec- tions to its members to give them an idea of what they should grow. “We’ve blown through that every year and then some,” Robinette said. “That’s real- ly helped us be able to give our farmers some certainty to scale up (production). It can be a really big investment to put more land under cultiva- tion. We want to try and give farmers a guarantee.” Gonzaga University is the biggest customer, though the co-op also works with other area universities and is get- ting into hospital food service and exploring the possibili- ty of expanding into nursing homes. “A lot of those big institu- tions, there’s tons of opportu- nity there, but it just takes a re- ally long time to get your foot in the door,” Robinette said. “Some customers, it’s tak- en 18 months from when we started initial conversations to when we could actually start to become an approved ven- dor. It takes a certain amount of persistence to open some of those doors.” Robinette is especially excited about expanding into hospitals. “Hospitals are places for people to heal and get better,” she said. “I just know having access to great produce has to be helpful to that.” Spokane restaurants such as the Blackbird Eatery, Cen- tral Food and Tomato Street are all customers. “We’re always looking for opportunities like that. Where can we get local produce or food into a place where it’s never really been accessible before?” Robinette said. Growing sales In the co-op’s fi rst year, it had $30,000 in sales. Last year, sales blossomed to $250,000. “We were very close to breaking even last year,” Rob- inette said. “I think we’re go- ing to have another really big year of growth.” The co-op would have been profi table last year but purchased equipment for its barley-malting operation in nearby Spokane Valley called Palouse Pint. It supplies malt barley to micro-breweries. Washington Gov. Jay Ins- lee toured the malting facility in March. “This is the first malting facility in Spokane since Prohibition, and one of two in the state,” said Tara Lee, deputy communications manager for the governor’s office. “It provides a unique opportunity for smaller farmers to market their crops in a new way while grow- ing the craft beer industry in Washington.” Robinette believes the state’s interest was partly due to the co-op’s work with barley. “It’s one thing to take or- ganic vegetables and sell them locally. That’s really cool,” she said. “But to be able to take what’s normally a really big commodity crop — where the farmer has no connection with the end-user — (and) actually give those farmers a way to connect with the end-user of their product, I think that piqued their inter- est.” Since its founding, LINC Foods has also received sev- eral grants to help it become established and grow. The Washington State Department of Agriculture provided the co-op with a $138,000 USDA Specialty Crop Block Grant in 2015 to start the LINC Foods Safety Program and help farmers ob- tain Good Agricultural Prac- tices certifi cation. The grant ends in 2018, according to de- partment public information offi cer Mike Louisell. In 2016, LINC Foods re- ceived $301,261 from the specialty crop multi-state program, which promotes col- laboration with other grow- er organizations in Eastern Washington, Northern Idaho and Western Montana and food safety training by pro- viding GAP and Food Safety Modernization Act education, resources and technical assis- tance. A USDA Value Added Producers Grant for $250,000 supports malt marketing, Robinette said. “The grants are really help- ful,” she said. “We are using them to help us grow faster than we could have otherwise while building a sustainable business model.” What’s next Much of the co-op’s sales go to schools, which take the summer off, so more large customers are needed in the summer, Robinette said. “A couple big institutions that wanted to purchase from us year-round would be really helpful,” she said. The co-op also started a Community Supported Agri- culture-like produce program to bolster summer sales. Robinette also wants to continue to cooperate with other regional food hubs, coordinating marketing and sharing information. She expects more farmers to join, although the co-op must balance giving existing farmer-owners more opportu- nities with adding new grow- ers, she said. “So far we’ve just so sur- passed what we’ve been able to get our hands on,” she said. “I think that we’ll be adding more farmers for a while.” ‘People don’t understand the amount of genetic change that’s already happened (naturally) over literally centuries’ MONSANTO from Page 1 Asked if the merger will create redundancies be- tween the Woodland facili- ty and Bayer CropScience’s new vegetable seed lab and greenhouses in West Sacra- mento, Purcell said there are some differences between the two labs. Moreover, ag research facilities in the area already interact and collaborate be- cause of their proximity to the University of Califor- nia-Davis, he said. Monsanto is working with other universities, too. The company recently en- tered into an agreement with the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University to use so-called CRISPR Cpf1 technology, which allows researchers to edit genomes at precise locations, according to the institute. Using the technology, researchers can edit traits in corn, soybeans and other crops and ultimately develop new varieties years soon- er than by using traditional breeding techniques, Mon- santo vice president of bio- technology Tom Adams has said. “It’s early,” Purcell said of development and use of the CRISPR technology. As for the wider issue of GMOs, he said it is “one tool” that growers can use. “In biotech, GMO is a great tool,” he said. “You need all the tools in the tool box.” He said most people want good, safe, affordable food, and there’s room for all types of production in the marketplace. “People don’t under- stand the amount of genetic change that’s already hap- pened (naturally) over liter- ally centuries,” Purcell said. At the same time, while some in the company wish they could move faster with advances in genet- ics, “you have to operate within society’s norms,” he said.